


Sommeil de l'ame

by Snailcronomycota



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Asphyxiation, Dissociation, Existential Crisis, Existentialism, I judge myself so you don't get to haha, M/M, Nihilism, Not really specified - Freeform, Or pseudo-incest, Paris (City), Potentially pretentious edgelord reasoning, References to Drugs, Sibling Incest, Trippy, Violent Sex, Weird Plot Shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:29:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28922871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snailcronomycota/pseuds/Snailcronomycota
Summary: On a mission in Paris to catch an international crime lord, Interpol Agent Thor Odinson finds that although he's never been there before, every step on the cobblestone of this old city feels eerily familiar. It could simply be because Loki, his long dead brother, used to describe it so vividly when he lived there that he hears an echo of his voice everywhere he goes.Caught in a perpetual sense of déjà vu, memories running rampant through his mind, Thor will come to doubt everything he knows--including whether he himself is even alive or not.
Relationships: Loki/Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 63





	Sommeil de l'ame

_ Ou est elle la Mort? toujours  
future ou passée. Apeine est-elle  
presente, que deja elle n’est plus.  _

  
  


_Where is Death? Always to come or passed by. She's barely been present when she's already gone._

  
  


_-_ Inscription found in the catacombs of Paris

Thor drifts like a ghost through a mass of lost souls.

His feet hum in the vibrations of the steady, if somewhat slow pulse of the kick drum.

His pupils widen and constrict in response to the changing lights. Pink. Purple. Red. A surreal fire, burning cold, reflecting off the gloves on his hands to let them glisten neon, shadows blue. Inhuman. Undead.

He closes his eyes, and for a moment, it's like he can grasp the flaw in the logic—like realizing, in a dream or in a déjà vu, that the situation makes no sense.

But he's not waking up, and worse: when he tries, when his cognition reaches far enough, he remembers exactly how he got here.

They arrive in Paris on a sunless day, and the city looks like an undated photograph in sepia. The rooftops line up in brownish grey tones, with virtually no contrast to the cloud-engulfed sky.

_Taupe_ , Thor thinks of the colour. He's been practising his French just for this mission, although he has to admit that he'll probably never fully grasp the language in his lifetime.

It was more Loki's thing, anyway.

Nat meets him at  _Gare du Nord_ train station, looking like the stereotype of a Parisian woman: sophisticated and unattainable. Somewhat ethereal, clad in her trench coat, perfectly in camouflage with the timeless tones of the city.

He kisses her hand in a showy, old-timey gesture, just because it fits. The leather of her glove is cold against his lips.

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle” He tries.

She laughs at his atrocious pronunciation, and Thor can't blame her. He can practically hear an echo of Loki's pedantic voice intoning the syllables anew to correct him, can see his silver tongue curl around the foreign consonants with a fluid and natural ease, like he, unlike Thor, wasn't raised in harsh Norwegian at all. Like the two of them weren't even raised in the same family at all.

But Loki's voice is only that, an echo, and Thor will never hear it speak French again.

“Sorry, I didn't get that”, he says to Natasha, when he realizes, in laconic surprise, that they're stopping to sit down in a small café with ornate wire chairs next to the Seine.

She's been talking to him the entire time.

She groans in exasperation. “Oh my God! I get it, Paris is pretty, but seriously, are you even present _at all_?” she asks. Thor smiles apologetically, and she continues. “ _Again_ , and abridged: Our suspect is an international crime lord, what you'd call an all-rounder—drugs, illegal fighting rings, money laundering, smuggling, possibly even sex trade. You name it, he's got it.”

She shoves her phone in his face, on it a picture of a middle-aged tan man, smirking a bleached white smile over a blue soul patch.

“This is the guy. Goes by _Le_ _Grand Maître_ here—the Grandmaster. We have one of his clubs localised somewhere to the south of the city, and the very founded suspicion that he himself is in there, in person, tonight. _Capiche_?”

Thor nods. He feels a little bad for zoning out before, so he adds a lame joke. “I think that's Italian, though.”

She playfully slaps him on the head with the menu, and when Thor laughs it feels real.

The team is assembled. They're planning an infiltration later in the day, but before that there's time to kill.

Thor finds himself walking down the run-down cobblestones of the  _Champs Elysées_ with Nat and Tony _._ The setting sun shines through the trees in patches.

“I might buy myself a nice little property down here. I mean, it's cliché, but” Tony starts saying, then stops, and grins. “But _that_ , exactly. French is ubiquitous. Familiar, even, so integrated that we don't even notice it any more. One could say we're pretty... _blasé_ about it. And that gives it a certain, _je ne sais quoi._ A timeless... _flair._ ”

Thor laughs on automation because Natasha is laughing, but what he's hearing in his head is a different conversation, one he had years ago, when he was in America for his Interpol training and Loki skyped with him during his studies in Paris.

“ _Don't you think it's beautiful? It just rolls off the tongue,_ Champs Elysées _.”_

_Thor shrugged. “Just sounds_ French _to me. Does it even mean anything?”_

_Loki clucked his tongue. “You uncultured swine. In Greek mythology, Elysium was the place all heroes went to rest. An afterlife for those chosen by the gods.”_

“ _Afterlife, huh? So... the Greeks stole Valhalla and then the French used it to name a street?”_

_Loki sighed. “Everything is so simple for you, isn't it. If anything, the Vikings_ _stole Elysium.” he paused, and Thor instantly recognized, through the sound of his silence, that it was full of ideas._

_Loki could do that, even if it wasn't on purpose: make a silence mean as much as his most flourished sentence._

“ _Just comes to show... how interchangeable it all is. Across cultures, across continents, all of us have tried to imagine a life after death. Just so living means something. Just so it doesn't feel as empty, short and pointless as it is.”_

_Thor groaned in frustration. “Norns, Loki. You read too much depressing French shit.” Thor could not resist the pun, “Pardon_ my _French.”_

_Loki hung up soon after, avoidant. Possibly hurt._

_But Thor didn't care. It was_ one _phone call from Loki, and they had plenty ahead of them, endless time to make up._

The tree-engraved Euro coin in his hand reflects light into his pupil, making him look up: the _Champs Elysées_ are gone, and he's putting the coin on a man's hand. They're paying for a boat ride across the Seine, to the southern part of Paris.

Crossing the river feels like leaving a world behind.

They're sitting in their van waiting for orders, in civilian clothes. The plan is to infiltrate rather than ambush. The less attention they call to themselves the better; maybe they'll even manage to get out of the club, with the dude, completely unnoticed by the crowd.

Thor checks the magazine in his handgun in thoughtless automation, takes a moment to adjust his vest under his dress shirt, counts the rounds he carries hidden around his calves.

Suddenly, an eerie feeling halts his hands. He feels like he's lived this very moment before.

_Déjà vu_.

But... he _knows_ he hasn't. He _knows_ it's just something human brains do.

Loki's voice, again.

“ _Don't be stupid, Thor. It's nothing more than a failed signal in your brain, causing the present to feel like the past. Thinking that the situation has been lived before is only superstition, a futile human attempt to validate our faulted perception as if it couldn't lie to us on a whim.”_

And yet—even this memory, in conjunction to this moment, feels so terribly familiar. But he's never been here before, and he's never lived this before. He's only replayed Loki's words in his head before, again and again and again, to remind himself that his perception lies.

A small pain in his ribs interrupts his reverie: Tony just elbowed him.

“Want some marching powder, for stamina?”

Thor blinks in confusion. There's a small transparent bag filled with white powder in Tony's hand, and it takes him a moment to realize what it is.

“No thanks” he says once it dawns on him, looking away from it instantly.

He shakes his head. He likes Tony, but sometimes the man is downright _immoral_.

Tony shrugs and pours himself a line. “Suit yourself. Just thought you might want a little something to wake you up.”

Thor ignores him and looks blankly forwards. He just wants to get on with the mission so they can finally leave Paris; so he can finally escape the echo of Loki's voice.

Stark speaks up again. “Just out of curiosity, is it a health concern, a purity concern, or just your good old hero complex?”

Thor doesn't want to get angry. Their moral standards may diverge but Tony is his friend, he knows Thor's history, and Thor trusts him. So he sighs and tries with the truth.

“You know, Stark... I'm at a point where my moral code is all that remains of my life. Feels... a bit harsh to let that go, doesn't it?”

Stark looks up and considers him for a moment.

“Sorry, no judgement.” He says, finally, and pauses briefly. “We all hold on to what we can.”

In the silence that follows, Thor's gaze drifts away again, the echo of Tony's words buzzing in his head.

Then there's the harsh sound of Tony snorting the powder, accompanied by a surprised exclamation.

“Director Fury! Right, sorry, Sir, musta.... _sneezed_ there or something—yes, of course, copy that” 

Tony stands up abruptly and proclaims, “Alright, you all know the drill. Pick different ways, couple walks around the block so we're coming from different directions. And! We're out in three—two--”

Thor is slightly taken aback by the suddenness of it all and fumbles with his gun for a moment before hiding it in his ankle strap, but he manages to look up at the precise time to see Tony wink at him and say,

“...one. _Allons-y!_ ”

They re-group inside.

In the club it's suffocatingly hot, and Thor thanks Stark, for lack of a higher instance, for planning this mission in casual clothing; the armour would have _killed_ him.

“Okay, each of us is taking one floor. Point Break, you're watching the ground floor. If the Grand Douchebag somehow catches wind of us being here, we'll be expecting company; tell us if that happens” he hears Tony's voice through the eerily crackling intercom, at the same time as his lips move.

Thor turns around.

The room is swaying to the pulse of the music, like a single organic mass. Square metres upon square metres of dancing, grinding, _writhing_ bodies, shimmering phantasmagorically in the surreal colour of the shifting neon lights, skins in alien palettes, no human skin tones left.

“ _The rest, I'm assigning you positions”_ , the intercom chimes.

Thor looks around. He feels lost, disoriented, in this sudden mass of writhing flesh around him, so many lives concentrated in just one spot, smothering him in the smell of their bodies. He breathes as flatly as he can, tries to feel inconspicuous so he doesn't stand out amongst the others.

He scans the room.

The light shifts to a dark green as he's looking.

Within the mass, black curls catch his eye—like a bullet in this mass of flesh, one foreign object, clearly differentiated from the rest.

Something about them is entrancing. Eerie. _Déjà vu._

Tony's voice keeps muttering orders to the others.

He stands and looks at the tall figure behind those curls. Slender shoulders, clad in black, reflecting green--

“ _He's in a lounge in the upper floors”_ says the intercom, somewhere far away; but right then, the DJ applies an effect to the music, and the words stop mattering.

The drums sound dulled, like Thor is underwater, the beat heavy and somehow stronger inside his vest than outside his body, reverberating inside him like a substitute for a heartbeat.

The lights go off. Total darkness, a shock of cold.

Then: strobe.

His pupils widen and constrict. He hears his own breathing, feels the music like a pulse.

The crowd seems to writhe in slow-motion, like reality turned into a picture reel with low frame rate, but Thor can barely see them: his eyes are fixed on the cut-off sway of those black curls, highly defined in the single beats of the strobe.

He moves towards the figure lit in stop-and-go, drawn by the texture and winding of the curls, entrancing— _familiar_ \--

Time becomes inconsistent, and somehow, instead of a picture reel, every frame is its own moment.

**Black**. The curls move to the side. **Black**. A sliver of a face is visible. **Black**. The face is now almost in profile, the indication of a nose.

**Black**. Thor doesn't breathe.

**Black**. He knows that nose, its sharp length, the shadows at the sides of it. **Black**. His cheekbones are sharp, his cheeks somewhat haggard.

**Black**.

_(“Point Break, any movement in the ground floor?”_ )

And the last image burns into his retinas:

Eyes wide-open, but his pupils don't constrict with the light, so Thor can only reconstruct the green he knows surrounds them. There's dark circles under his eyes, from insomnia or drugs or both, and his mouth is parted in the shape of Thor's name.

_(“Point Break, do you copy?”)_

Black.

It's Loki, in high definition, standing in a club,  _alive._

Black. He's running away.

Black, and Thor is bolting after him, knocking people over--Black, he could jump and catch him--

Movement in his peripheral vision, and before he knows what's happening, a big bulk in a black suit is throwing him to the ground.

“Loki!” he chokes out, trying to fend off his aggressor.

The intercom crackles but falls out of his ear. The strobe doesn't stop, but it picks ups its pace, turns into a frantic moving picture again.

An elbow; a face; teeth; blood; laughter; a knee; a gun.

Thor loses all sense of being human, and _fights._

Eyelashes clouding his vision as he blinks. Blinks again. _Rosé._

He's standing on a hill, and the sun is coming up.

For a moment, he just stands there, disoriented. Trying to remember.

He looks down: his hands are covered in blood, his clothes are torn and dirty. His ankle holster is empty.

The vague memory of what panic feels like. Like remembering a nightmare: the feeling is _there_ , but it belongs to another realm, a world he left behind.

He thinks between the worlds. What the fuck? How did he _get_ here? And—and--

Did he really see...?

Before he can even process the thought, feel its implications, his phone vibrates in his front pocket.

It's Natasha.

He puts the phone to his ear automatically, vaguely noticing that it doesn't collide with the intercom.

“Oh my god, you're alive” Nat greets him, almost in tears by the sound of it.

Thor doesn't know what to answer.

Tony is yelling at him.

Thor looks at his hands in the surreal taupe light that floods in through the hotel room window. They look strange, he finds. Like they aren't really his hands.

“--lost our shot at a peaceful arrest—He'll be doubling down on security now, you know?! And thank god the rest of us got out undetected, hopefully he thinks you were just a vigilante or something--”

Thor nods, and nods, and nods, like those figurines they put on the dashboard of cars. Or used to put. Do people still do that?

Did they ever stop? Did time even pass?

He blinks in disorientation and looks out the window.

Paris, outside, looks like a snapshot on a postcard. He looks for an indication, _any_ indication, of what year they have, but all he sees is taupe rooftops and fog and somewhere a thin metal tower. Just enough to let him know where he is, but only that: a spacial coordinate with no marker for time.

The bed sinks next to him, and a smaller, gloved hand falls onto his.

“Thor, what happened?” Nat asks.

He blinks, slow to catch up with the reality of her. Her clothes are vintage, her lipstick red. Her hair is pulled back in a stylish, _timeless_ bun. She looks at him with tenderness, far removed from her usual cold calculation.

“I saw Loki” he says flatly.

They look at him like they're the ones seeing a ghost. Thor goes on.

“When I was scanning the club for security, I saw him right in front of me. I ran after him. My movement must have alarmed the security I failed to see.”

Tony looks at him like he doesn't know what to say, and Natasha clears her throat.

“That's... unlikely.”

Thor nods, because she's right.

There's not much more to say, really.

Ages ago, they caught Loki. He died escaping prison. It was Thor who identified his corpse.

Stark strokes his goatee. “Normally I'm all for conspiracy theories, and he _was_ a sneaky guy, but I'm gonna have to agree with Nat here--'unlikely' is nicely put.”

Thor remembers Loki's unblinking eyes, the burst blood vessels on his skin, his pale lips. He remembers how cold he seemed.

Nat seems to understand how that must make him feel, which Thor finds remarkable because he really doesn't know.

“I... don't mean to undermine what you saw. You're a sane guy and a good agent, and your instincts have always been sharp. So if you think you saw something... you probably saw something” she says, calmly, and looks over at Tony, who looks pensive for a moment and then nods.

“Right. Sorry, Point Break. Your creepy little brother was an international threat, and going against your instinct on this could lead us away from something actually significant. So let's think about this. Are you _sure_?”

Thor looks past them, out the window. A single ray of sun brings out the brown hue to the clouds, making the rooftops look like an old Polaroid picture, like the ones Loki used to send.

A snapshot, lost in time. How could Thor possibly know if he's looking at a picture, or the real city?He remembers only that his perception lies.

“Loki used to study in Paris. This place... reminds me so much of him.”

Natasha lets out a soft exhalation, and when Thor looks at her, she's looking at him with compassion for something he doesn't feel.

Tony sits down on the floor in front of him with a sigh. “I'm, uh, I'm sorry for calling him creepy?”

He's expecting Thor to smile, so Thor does, on automation.

“What Tony, who unmistakeably is an only child, wants to say is probably that it's still weird to think of him as someone you loved... but we're your friends.” Natasha says, putting her other hand under the one of Thor's she's already holding, sandwiching it in her cold touch. “If you think you saw Loki, we'll look into it. And if you think you... didn't, you can still talk to us about it.”

Thor closes his eyes and tries to remember.

A million sights of Loki flash through his eyes, in strobe, like a picture reel. Years and years of memories, images and sounds and conversations only Thor remembers now.

Those memories are all there _is_ of Loki. They're all that remains: images in his brain, moments already past. A new one couldn't form, because there just is no more Loki.

The one from yesterday, compared to a lifetime of his brother, is as real as a déjà vu: only proof that his perception lies.

It hurts somewhere in the background, but it's also nothing new, so there's no new tears to shed and the pain is dull. Still, he takes his hand away from Natasha's and briefly rubs his eyes.

“It was my grief come to life in a trick of the lights” he says, finally.

Tony sighs in relief. “Okay, buddy. I don't mean to be up your ass like Fury is up mine, but... maybe it's better if you sit this one out?”

Thor understands him fully. He's confused, blacked out right after the club, woke up covered in blood he doesn't even remember spiling; letting him carry a gun like this would be nothing but irresponsible.

“No, I'm fine” he hears himself say nonetheless.

Tony looks like he wants to disagree with him, and Thor understands why. Ultimately Stark shrugs and says “Alright, then. We're going in in full armour tonight, no more room for subtlety. I expect your instincts sharp and your mind present. Do you copy?”

Instincts sharp. Mind...

“Of course.”

A black quadratic frame limits his field of perception, a 4:3 ratio. His breath is loud inside his helmet.

He looks at the faces of his teammates, all framed black, waiting in armour like him to enter the club, posted at its very Gates. Tony's voice is not so loud Thor could hear it through his helmet; the others must hear him over their intercoms.

Blinking in confusion when he realizes Tony's lips move without sound, Thor mutters, “Wait”, but no one hears him. It's all sudden—sudden and yet slow—blurry--something's not right, he doesn't know where he is--

But his body is conditioned by years of career, and when Stark gives the signal, they all burst through the doors.

Thor drifts like a ghost through a mass of lost souls.

He closes his eyes, and for a moment, it's like he can grasp the flaw in the logic—like realizing, in a dream or in a déjà vu, that the situation makes no sense.

But he's not waking up, and worse: when he tries, when his cognition reaches far enough, he remembers exactly how he got here.

Move. He needs to move. He can't drift.

Jumpstarting if not his mind then at least his body, he runs.

He collides with people as he shoves them aside, the impact shaking his body, and they tumble down but otherwise don't seem disturbed. No screams are heard through his helmet and over the roaring techno, making him wonder if they can even tell he's there. Everything is so loud, but his presence--

He fights his way towards a grey door at the back. He shoulders it open and finds a staircase, finds himself at its very top in a jump, shoulders the next door.

Another floor. Couches and _chaise longues_ line the wall. The mass shuffles around slowly, swaying rather than dancing, engulfed in a blueish cloud of mist which chills Thor through to the bone; but he _runs_ , following the tug in his gut, to another door at the far end, his boots thundering up another staircase.

The music is harder here. Sounds of shattering glass and distorted, hellish voices in a sampled loop resound in his helmet. He finds himself spinning around, his own gasps startling him as he catches random sights—a cage in the back, people around it, yelling; monitors with footage of a raging fire bathing the room red. He meets no gazes however—they all cramp in the same rhythm, in brusque, aggressive movements, and their glazed eyes don't fall on the outsider. Disturbed, but still running, Thor spots the next door and bolts for it.

Up the next flight of stairs, Thor barges through the door into a dimly lit room with silver walls where the beat of the music is slower, more trap-like, his panting faster than its rhythm. It smells distinctly metallic here, and Thor can see bills raining down on golden-painted strippers of all genders dancing on golden poles. Thor can feel it as he stumbles through: he's getting close.

On the next floor, the mist has become smoke, and the light shines colourful from LED screens with psychedelic visuals. The smoke is too heavy to be tobacco—but Thor sees soon enough that some is from pipes, some is from bongs, some is from joints. He feels himself suffocate in his helmet, fights with the visor, and bangs against a food covered table in the middle of the room. He catches himself, stumbles past it as well as he can. His confused gaze falls on drinks, and pills, and powders.

His helmet fills with smoke so he tears it off, tries to breathe, feels no air, gags. His vision spins, but he needs to keep going-- he needs to keep moving, because--

Because...

He stumbles through the smoke asynchronous to the beat. His lungs fight the restraint of his bullet proof vest. He crashes through the door, his legs giving out, but he doesn't fall, and he doesn't breathe: he keeps moving, keeps running.

The staircase again, and the music is dulled by the door, but there's still a tumult of noise. Yelling, there's people yelling here, and gunshots, and Thor is running towards them. Vision double, head spinning, no feeling left, only his clouded perception.

The room is a blur of blinding gold, the imagery reaches him in impressionistic strokes at random flitting glances. Marble statues are knocked over, invaluable pieces dusting the golden tiles. There's movement, so much movement, from one place to another, one side to another, black suits and black armours, and on a gigantic pearl white couch a tan man in a golden robe with a blue soul patch and his hands up.

One moment Thor sees the rushing figures, hears the deafening noises, and then it's silence, and his vision narrows into a tunnel.

Because there, in the back, between two golden Corinthian columns framing an ostentatious mirror, pressed to the glass as if to try and slip through it, is _Loki_.

His heartbeat, or the bare pulse of the club.

Thor sees nothing else. No gold, no red, no bullets; only his brother, standing there clad in black and looking right into his eyes, standing out from the blur through his stillness.

He roars his name and charges into the room, heedless of every voice crying after him, heedless of the black figures shifting around. He bolts for the cut-out shape in front of the mirror, vaguely registers it lifting its arms and a spark--

Something hits his chest.

Time stops.

He's falling, drifting towards the ground in slow motion.

He assesses the damage on automation, not a conscious thought, a background program running an analysis. There's a smouldering hole in his chest, on the side, and a far away pain he's had before, in his rib.

The bullet-proof vest caught it, but the impact must have broken the bone. Only that.

_Loki--_

He stomps his foot onto the floor before he falls, catches himself, feeling the impact of his boot vibrating through every bone in his leg, hip, back, head, shaking him back, but instead of stopping, he propels his other foot next, keeps going, as time resumes.

He looks up and finds himself running towards the mirror, and there--

Right in front of him, a shaking image of himself stares back at him with wild eyes. Just _himself_ , clad in black armour from head to toe, face sweaty and haggard from exertion and pain.

He stands there and looks at himself, unmoving in contrast to the background. He looks at the rings under his eyes and the redness to his scleras and the veins on his nose, until he sees someone standing there next to him, shaking him, and slowly the incessant ringing in his ears turns into the faraway echo of a voice.

He tears his eyes away from his own and towards Tony's, but he's not in armour, and he's not screaming at him, and Thor isn't standing any more.

He gasps, and looks at his hands. He's not wearing gloves. They're resting on a table, and besides Tony's voice the room is fully silent.

Nothing adds up any more. _Are_ these his hands? Is he even...

“...are you even _listening?!_ ”

He blinks. “Stark” he says.

Tony looks at him with ire, and then his eyes soften with something akin to worry. “Again?”

“Huh?”

Tony quits pacing, sighs and sits down on the other side of the table.

“We're putting our asses on the line for you. We all agreed that we're not gonna mention a word to Fury. But we need to get you a psych eval, man, as soon as we're back home. You keep spacing out. Until you fix this, you're not coming on any missions for a while. Do you understand?”

Thor _remembers_. He was supposed to watch the elevator, on the ground floor, in case reinforcements came or someone made it out.

He abandoned his post, putting them all in peril by wandering around every floor and then barging into the thick of the conflict.

He remembers...

“Thor!” Tony says again.

“Yes” Thor answers, to get him off his back. “Yes, I understand!”

He remembers, but something about it...

“Good. Now, the problem is that you've been shot, as you will hopefully have noticed, which we all need to write down in our protocols cohesively. So I need to know from you what exactly you plan to tell Fury about it, so that you don't inadvertently get us all fired for trying to cover your ass.”

With a start, Thor remembers the pain. He looks down to his chest in an instant, and when he sees a T-shirt he doesn't remember putting on he makes to raise it with his arms. The movement itself hurts, but he still lifts it to reveal an immense but innocuous purplish blue bruise on the lower ribs of his right side, right above a scar he's carried around for ages.

“Right, don't mind me, just flash me your abs” he hears Tony say, but he can't focus on his words because he feels the pain sharply in his next inhale.

And yet...

Was it there the whole time? Breathing hurts now that he knows, and when he tries to remember, when his cognition reaches far enough, he can tell that it has since he was shot. He was breathing flatly, that much is for sure, probably to compensate--

He stares at his marred chest, not knowing what to make of it, of how foreign it feels, but now that he looks at them, his hands as well, and—and that's familiar, the feeling that his hands aren't truly his--

His head spins, probably from how flatly he was breathing, but holy fuck, how long has he _been_ barely breathing before? Why didn't it hurt until right now? Why didn't he even remember anything until Tony told him about it?

He still looks at his hands, and suddenly a thought crosses his mind: is he even feeling _this_ right now?

Like how he got here at all, like how he got the bruise in the first place—it's like he knows the _story_ , but he knows it because someone told him. Because he's telling himself. Because he's seeing it in frames, so it must be true.

But he also saw Loki, and Loki is _dead_...

“...Hey!” Tony snaps his fingers in front of his eyes, and Thor jumps in his seat. The pain explodes in his side from the jerking motion and he yelps. “Shit, that... looked painful. But Thor, buddy--I need you to stay with me”

Thor lowers his shirt. “And where is that?” he hears himself murmur.

Tony looks at him like he doesn't know if Thor is serious or not, and a numbness spread through Thor when he recalls, laying thickly over the pain like he's underwater, drowning it in cold.

He stands up and walks to the window.

It's daytime outside, although what time exactly he doesn't know, because it's impossible to pinpoint the sun; the whole sky looks greyish-brown, the uniform background of a staged photograph in sepia. Rooftops of different heights align, every building old as stone, extending for as long as his eyes can see; forming patterns in the distance where the spindly top of the Eiffel tower stabs the mist of his memory.

Tony's hand is on his shoulder. “We're still in Paris.”

Still. Still in Paris.

Sure they are. They never left.

But... were they ever anywhere else?

“Which is why we need a statement. So we can all go home.”

Thor nods to Tony's words, still looking at the timeless beauty of the city outside the window, remembering every street, every block in the cobblestone, although the memories aren't his.

He nods, and nods, and nods. _Déjà vu_.

“I'm staying.” he says, still nodding.

Stark's eyes stare right into his a moment later, his face incredulous. “What?”

Thor doesn't want to get angry. Tony is his friend and Thor trusts him. So he closes his eyes, sighs, and tries with the truth.

“I'm not ever leaving Paris.”

Tony is grasping for words. His mouth closes and opens. He looks furious, bemused, and sad at the same time. Fun how Thor can tell how his friend is feeling, but his own emotions aren't there at all.

“Your brother is dead” Stark finally says.

The déjà vu engulfs Thor when he inclines his head to nod again, so he acts against it, and doesn't.

Ainsi tout passe sur la terre  
Esprit, beauté, grâces talent  
Telle est une fleur ephémère  
Que renverse le moindre vent

_Thus passes everything on earth // Spirit, beauty, grace, talent// Such is a fleeting flower// That the smallest wind overthrows._

_-_ Inscription found in the catacombs of Paris

_Loki's laughter rings bright as day in his ear, boxy through the telephone speaker but still clear and juvenile and beautiful, and Thor keeps his French impersonation up by laughing nasally._

“ _Stop it! Stop! Must you ruin everything I like?”_

“ _You love it when I do funny accents. You know you do. And I'm not ruining it, I'm just making sure that you remember me when you eat your frog legs and sip your Rosé”_

_In response Loki starts out laughing again, but slowly his laughter turns hollow, until he stops. His silence is deliberating, wondering; Thor can see him in his mind's eye like in a moving picture, walking and smiling and then stopping suddenly, smile frozen, disorientation on his face._

“ _What's wrong, brother? Did you choke on a snail?”_

_Loki's voice is dreamy, tentative, like he isn't really there. “It's nothing. Just... a déjà vu.”_

“ _Oh? I thought you didn't believe in those?”_

_A groan on the other side. “It's not a matter of belief, it's a matter of perception: when they're happening, they are happening. Now, do I believe that they are paranormal precognition, or flashed events from a past life? No, obviously not.”_

“ _Well, how do you explain them, then? Because I hate those. I always feel like there's something I'm not getting, you know what I mean? Like maybe it's significant, but it's going right over my head.”_

_Loki lets out a laugh. “Yes, I suppose you must have the feeling of things going over your head a lot, poor you.”_

_His insult takes Thor a moment to process. “Hey!” he protests, half in jest, although he does feel that Loki mocks him ill-spiritedly. The thought makes him want to retaliate. “Oh, I get why you're so defensive. What if you're only good at French because you were French in a past life, and déjà vus just prove that?”_

_He takes in the pitch of rage in Loki's following silence with a sense of satisfaction._

“ _Incredible, how you always hear just what you want to hear. Don't be stupid, Thor.” Loki says with disdain. He then puts on his most rational voice. “It's nothing more than a failed signal in your brain, causing the present to feel like the past. Thinking that the situation has been lived before is only superstition, a futile human attempt to validate our faulted perception as if it couldn't lie to us on a whim.”_

“ _And if you already know that, how come it still confuses you?”_

_Loki is quiet for a few moments._

“ _Because it's quite different to_ know _something... and to_ feel _it, isn't it?”_

A heavy dome of fog settles over Paris, blurring streets and cars. It lays thick over the city like a spell, blanketing buildings and monuments, absorbing their presence and spreading their history through today so that past and present are clothed in the same sepia haze.

When Thor went to the club again, its heavy black entrance gate was criss-crossed with red and white tape, closed to him forever. But he knew it would be: he couldn't expect to just go and find...

Whatever it is he's drifting towards.

(Sense? A purpose? A flash of white light, at the end of the tunnel?)

In this fog, the calendar is obsolete. Days no longer count, technology is but a confused remnant of a future that simply happens to have occurred already. There's no ticking clocks, and the church bells of Paris echo in the mist like somewhere, many layers of Earth above, their sound waves spread out widely, stretched, rippling through the heavy water particles.

Thor can't hear his footsteps over the muffled soundscape of the city. The only indication that he's using them to walk is visual, but he wonders, seeing them glide over the asphalt, if this is not just a recording of his feet in times past, playing in front of his eyes.

He _knows_ they're moving, but he can not _feel_ it. He can not feel anything.

He collides with someone on the crosswalk and feels no need to apologize. His voice would ring foreign in his head, in French, like he wasn't the one to speak at all; and somehow, he feels it unnecessary, because he doubts they will have noticed. He doubts they will remember.

_No one_ will remember. He's invisible, or rather: he's past. Maybe people see him, but he can not be felt, because he's no longer here.

All he has to hold onto, as the ghost he is now, are a dead man's footsteps. He retraces them, chasing the distant echo of Loki's voice.

Absurd to think that once he sought to escape it, thought he _could_. Now he listens for its lingering sound waves in every monument, every street name, imagines he can hear it narrating his every footfall on the anthracite and beige of the centuries old cobblestone.

He drifts over the mist wherever it will take him.

Thor had this job for a long time. Everything he had in his life he had for a long time: his long hair and his simple clothes, the scar between his ribs, his friends, his beliefs, his moral code.

Maybe it would be different if it was like in a dream: the situation is constructed, and remembering where the circumstances came from, how he got there, would yield no result.

That's not a mercy he can count on.

No, when he remembers, everything comes back. He can reconstruct every detail, every story builds up on the one before. Image after image after image, and all of them together, when you spin them quick enough, make a movie reel.

But just like a movie, he can see them projected, a recording of him and his life. Just like a movie, he sees it all but he can not _feel_ any of it. And just like a movie, it makes him wonder if it truly happened, or if the images were staged, carefully constructed so he couldn't wake up.

Thor has had this job for a long time. He sees himself in police training, and being promoted to Interpol. He sees Tony and Natasha and the rest. He sees how they became his family. It's all there, on film, and it all makes sense.

But it's a story told to him, a story he can tell himself. It's a movie he can watch: words and images and memory. It can no longer be felt, for it's past, and gone.

Maybe his team remembered those things as if they were real. Or maybe they just never questioned the feeling: they were his friends and they were going to hold on to him no matter what.

_We all hold on to what we can._

They would have lied for him, so he wouldn't get suspended; they would have put their jobs on the line, their whole careers, to cover up his mistakes, and they would have done it all because of a past Thor remembers, but can no longer feel, and can therefore no longer know whether it even happened at all.

A long distance call, and this time, it was Thor who was in Paris, spewing such nonsense into the phone Fury had no other choice but to fire him.

Tony didn't say another word to him. He turned and left.

Natasha was a picture as she stood in front of him, beautiful and timeless. In cuts, Thor can see her porcelain face, solemn but with an underlying sadness in her features; he can see her gloved hands reach for his but touching nothing... and then, one last look, the swing of her red hair as she turned around, and the swaying of her hips in the trenchcoat as she marched away, engulfed in the fog in a few paces, leaving behind only Paris.

As if they'd never been there at all.

Wire chairs, and the Seine. Thor's coat is stained from days of wandering about, lost. He doesn't remember how he got the pale rosé that sits on the small round table in front of him, its surface rippled by the vibrations on the pavement around him.

He blinks, but the mist is everywhere. The world outside this table is blurry, his eyes can only barely focus on the sepia filter on this particular picture: the table, the glass.

_Then, the black shape, cut out from it: Loki, in his black coat, the collar raised around a black scarf that disappears neatly within it. His fingers are long and pale as they curl elegantly around the stem of the glass. As Thor watches, he takes a sip, a reserved but slightly mischievous smirk on his beautiful face._

Thor gapes, reaches out his hand—and he jerks awake at the sound of a claxon.

He gasps at the pain in his rib, and when he blinks up, Loki is gone.

He takes a sip out of the glass, letting his gaze diffuse in its colour. When he puts it away from his lips, tasteless, he hears Loki's voice, tinny through the glass.

_“I'm just saying, Thor, that perhaps your world view is a bit rigid, don't you think?”_

_“How is it 'rigid'? I'd say it's the opposite. You don't believe in anything, and there, that's that, good bye. Total certainty. I'm just saying—there could be more. Therefore, more possibilities, therefore, less rigid. Boom.”_

_“Then again, brother, the existence of an afterlife—a selective one, at least, but Valhalla is a selective one—does put limits to your behaviour in life, does it not? It imposes a moral code, one that must always be followed, lest admission be threatened. Therefore, it is rigid, in the sense that it is restrictive.”_

_Thor hesitates, or he hesitated. The moment stretched on in his mind, where he considered—and then, he shrugged. “Whatever, though. I'd rather believe than live without integrity.”_

_Loki's voice is tight, strained, somehow—he sits very still, and his face is unreadable. “But don't you see... that what you call 'integrity' is nothing but an externally imposed way of life, validated by a threat so it is easier to follow?”_

Thor is caught in the discordance, the cacophony of being in two times at the same time.

Once, he wasn't here: he was a voice in the telephone, merely imagining Loki, who sat in this exact café and sipped his wine. Now Thor is, and it's Loki who is nothing but an echo.

He moves in past and present, and what he thought then is not what he thinks now. What he said then is a bizarre cacophony, playing across the shifted times, a sound that blurs his movement, deafens him, transports him back underwater.

_“I don't care.”_

_“No—you'd--you'd rather hold on forever to something that imprisons you, so long as you aren't left adrift”_

At Loki's snap, he jumps up again—the pain in his side vivid, real.

He finds himself alone again, the wine empty, downed without him even noticing as his mind replayed long lost words that are nothing now, mean nothing now.

Dizzy and lost, Thor drifts on.

He walks through the barred gate into the cemetery, its creaking an interruption of the laden silence. Rows upon rows of stone in different hues of sepia can be seen through the thin mist. His camel-coloured overcoat allows him to disappear within, camouflaged.

There's a quiet here, a peace hard to grasp. The distant echo of songbirds sounds like he's hearing it above ground.

He can just imagine—remember?-- _think_ of Loki, clad in black, sitting on one of the graves next to a statue he passes. He looks small, vulnerable; his shoulders are hunched, hidden in a coat, its neck high to shield his pale, beautiful face from the cold.

_Shaking, Loki takes out his cellphone. He closes his eyes, a small expression of pain creasing his features. Then he flips it open, presses a single button and talks into the receiver after a beat of waiting silence._

“ _Hello, brother.”_

_(Thor remembers the faraway sound of Loki's footsteps through the call, shuffling through the graveyard gravel in a waving background drone; but now what he hears on the other side is his own, tinny voice.)_

“ _Why didn't you call before?”_

“ _I've been thinking a lot. About... about everything. About... the nature of everything.”_

_Thor chuckles. “Oh Loki. Get out of your head. It's not doing you any good.”_

_Loki's expression contorts into pain, although his jaw clenches in anger. He exhales slowly, gazing to a tomb to his right, then shaking his head._

“ _I just wanted to hear your voice.”_

_There's the frantic shuffle of Thor sitting upright through the phone call. “Are you okay? Did something happen to you?”_

_Loki's minute smile is hurt, his lips pursing, starting to quiver. He closes his eyes, about to cry; but he swallows, and lets it go._

“ _I exist, that's all that's happened to me.” He says. He stops, passes a hand over his face. Then he half huffs and half laughs, a small, self-deprecating sound that floats in the uncertain valley between humour and tears. “No. I'm sorry, that was melodramatic. I don't mean to worry you. It's just... same old.”_

_Thor sighs. “_ Another _existential crisis?” Movement as he relaxes. “And? Did you reach a conclusion this time?”_

_Loki's face is so many things at once, in Thor's mind. All those expressions he never let anyone see, that only glimpsed through in the smallest of moments, or when he thought himself unobserved entirely. It shows anguish, and anger, and somewhere, lingering near his shaking irises, dulled in the sepia light of the cemetery, fear._

“ _Of course not, Thor. There_ is _no conclusion to be reached. The only conclusion is_ death _. Only_ then _will we have a sense of closure.”_

_Thor laughs dismissively. “Well,_ that  _was melodramatic.”_

_Loki's shoulders tense, his whole body cramps stiff, like a snake about to strike; it's all there, in his silence, for Thor to hear. But he eases himself back into his normal posture and keeps dragging his feet on the gravel path._

_Thor exhales, his voice a bit softer now. “Sorry, brother. You know my opinion: you simply think too much.”_

_Loki looks up to the sky, his face falling a bit; and yet, a moment after, a sort of resigned serenity spreads out through his statuesque features. “And you don't think at all. You're an imbecile, Thor. An imbecile who will never glimpse beyond his stupid sense of right and wrong.”_

“ _Whoa. What's even going on with you, Loki, are the French...?”_

“ _Stop it. Just... stop it with your stupid jokes. Stop it with your arrogant dismissal of everything I do. Stop, just one minute, and_ think _about the sheer absurdity of everything—about how—how fucking—_ stochastic _it all is. You mock a place you can not see across half the globe, talking to a faceless voice in a piece of metal and plastic as if it was a person you know—you live and you breathe and you eat and you sleep like an animal, and yet you think and communicate and--”_

“ _Christ, Loki, just fucking--”_

“ _What, Thor? Get a grip on reality? I did. I understand so much now. I understand how vast the world is, how far the universe beyond. I understand how minuscule we are, how little mankind stands out above every other animal. We are nothing, Thor, but animals with a slightly bigger brain scrambling around this planet, looking for a sense in the things we see, desperately trying to hold on to whatever we can: community, society, customs.”_

_A small pause, an intake of breath, then: “A moral code.”_

“ _Is there a point to this?” Thor says, his voice on the edge between teasing and angry._

_Loki's face is still serene, but slowly, ripples pass through his body and he puts his hand on his mouth, his finger lining the side of his nose. He crouches down, in the middle of the path, surrounded only by the silence of death._

“ _Don't you see... please, just see... If truly our moral code is simply something taught to us for us to hold on to... You must understand that it isn't wrong, or right. What I... what I really want.”_

_Thor's voice sounds uncomfortable. Nervous. “What, Loki? What is it that you want?”_

_Slowly, Loki's face reaches the determined calm of acceptance._

“ _I want you.”_

_Thor breathes on the other line._

_Then, he lets out a soft laugh. “Aaaw. Well, bonus points to you for creativity, brother! That's an interesting way to say you miss me.”_

_A small silence falls between them. Loki remains poised, cold and unmoving like a statue._

_Thor goes on, his voice soft. “Of course you do, Loki, you_ are _my brother. And of course I miss you too. It's only right.”_

_Loki puts a hand over the phone's microphone, lowers it away from his face, and sobs quietly into his other hand._

_Thor is talking when he raises the phone to his ear again. “--re you still there?”_

“ _Yes” Loki says, as steadily as he can. He stands up, aiding himself with a tomb, his face as cold and blank as the dull stone._

“ _Where are you? I think the connection's kinda bad”_

“ _Cimetière Montparnasse.”_

“ _Cimet..._ Loki! _You're not seriously having a phone call inside a fucking_ cemetery _, you insufferable goth kid—come on, have some respect!”_

_Loki laughs without life, letting his fingers slide over the lettering in a brown-grey slab dotted with dead moss. “For whom, Thor? They're dead. They no longer care about a sense of propriety.”_

“ _W—You—well, maybe not, but_ I _do!”_

_Loki shakily tries on a smile, again and again, until it fits._

“ _Yes, Thor. Yes, you do.”_

Thor stops dead in his tracks. He looks up and to the path ahead, through rows of lined-up monuments; statues fashioned in memory of someone long passed, with nothing to corroborate their likenesses to the thing they are depicting.

After all, what they depict no longer exists.

_Did Loki? Did either of them?_

Now, years later, Thor retraces his brother's footsteps and can not remember at all how Loki _felt_. How it felt to have him near. To talk to him, to see him. He can see his image and his likeness clearly in his mind's eye, but was he ever willing, really willing, to _feel_ him?

The memory tells a story. It cannot tell him the feeling.

Innocuous enough: Loki said that he wanted him.

A want can be a million things.

So Thor filled in the blanks with thought: he thought Loki wanted his presence. That he wanted his company. _Thinking_ about what Loki could want lend safe results: exactly what Thor wanted him to say.

_Incredible, how you always hear just what you want to hear._

But that was what Thor _thought_. When he tries to remember what he felt, following Loki's words, following Loki's logic, following what was there, in the silence, that could only be felt...

He can't. He feels nothing, now. He's drifting through Paris, nothing but memory and thought. He wants it to stop—this drifting, this terrible drifting, like he's just floating on this timeless mist.

He should have come to see Loki. He should have held him in his arms, smelled his hair. All he has now is his likeness, the things he has fashioned out of his silences.

But he can remember now what he didn't want to see then: that there was always that lingering sense of discomfort—when Loki was right in front of him, in the flesh, it was so strong that all Thor wanted was to look away.

As if it was _wrong_ to look at him.

_Wrong_...

There's only one more place beckoning him.

Constantly looking down, avoiding the eyes of people he's sure can't see him anyway, it doesn't take him long to find an entrance.

He's been drifting, for so long, hovering above the ground... now it's time to _sink._

Once he's jumped down, there's no discernible way back up, but that doesn't matter.

Here, in the damp murkiness of the stone covered in aeons old organic matter better not examined too closely, his footsteps do make squelching, sickening sounds. Somewhere, in the background, something drips erratically, and here and there there might be the scurrying of rodents scratching the walls.

Otherwise, it's silent.

The air isn't clean. It's damp, murky, and smells awful, but Thor doesn't care about how he breathes. It's an automated process: he doesn't control it. It's only there because his body has the function, it serves no purpose otherwise.

He puts his hand on the wall to orientate himself by touch. He went down without a second thought and brought no source of illumination with him.

Somehow, he knows he won't need it.

For a while his hand graces over smooth stone. His thoughts are quiet, for him to better follow nothing but his afflicted perception.

There's a red lightbulb after a time, and when he approaches it he sees a small metal staircase underneath. Without a second thought he climbs down.

It's even darker here, pitch black, but at least his footsteps echo now, no longer squelching. He focuses on the sound they make fully, until he notices a shift: the echo stops, as if there was no wall for the sound waves to be shot back.

He crouches and touches the wall. There's a hole just wide enough for him to squeeze through, so he does.

On the other side, there's no more sound, and it no longer stinks like the waste of the city above.

This new smell is waste of a different kind.

He knows exactly where he is once he stands up. On the far end of the hall he sees a small light, but it's not necessary to see the texture on the walls to know that they are lined with human skulls and bones.

In search of a ghost, he walked down into the catacombs.

He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath of the dead air and lets it fill his lungs.

“ _What the fuck, Loki? Why the hell would you go there?”_

“ _Because, when you detach it from its allocated meaning, it's a quiet, solemn place. A rare location where I can feel truly and blissfully alone.”_

“ _Alone—except for all the human carcasses, you mean!”_

“ _Yes, Thor._ Alone _.”_

_Thor doesn't know if his silence conveys the shock he feels. Loki's conveys nothing at all._

“ _Doesn't it freak you out even the littlest bit, though?”_

“ _No” Loki says, in the same dreamy tone as the day with the déjà vu. Then, his voice lets through a certain fragility. “Actually... Actually, I wish you could be here. I wish you could feel how utterly... empty it is. Like, once it's gone, it wasn't there at all.”_

_Thor has nothing to say. The tone of Loki's voice and the poetry in his words has him speechless, beautiful as it is, and it fills him with a yearning that makes him uncomfortable. He needs to end the call soon._

_Loki goes on. “Maybe, if you realized, you would stop caring. Maybe then you would stop holding on.”_

He opens his eyes.

He's surrounded by human remains and he feels no fear, not even unease; there _isn't_ an eerie sensation of being followed, of something watching him, of something lurking.

Loki was right. There's _nothing_ here but him.

He controls his hand: it isn't moving on its own accord when it raises, slowly, and his fingertips graze a skull.

It's just cold, and nothing else.

He breathes out, then in again, and walks slowly, letting his hand follow the grooves of the bones. They're polished, and when he looks away they are indistinguishable from stone.

Step by step, he approaches the light at the end of the hallway.

He knows, with each skull he touches, that it once had a brain inside, that it once was a person that breathed and lived and loved. And yet, the closer the light gets and the more bones he touches, the more he understands that this is only knowledge, and none of it is felt.

The truth is, those people have been gone for so long that they're not even memories any more. The truth is, their lives mattered none at all, and now they are as significant as construction material. The truth is, it doesn't feel like they were ever alive, simply because their lives are over now.

_Like, once it's gone, it wasn't there at all._

In a breeze of air that he didn't expect, Thor _understands_.

_This_ is his fate. He'll be dead and he'll be memory, and memory is _nothing._ Nothing he has ever done holds any meaning on the great scope of things.

He needs to let Loki know. He needs to let him know that now he understands.

Thor reaches the light at the end of the tunnel and crouches down.

It's a burning candle. There's no wax dripping down the sides of it, and it barely pools on its top: someone's been here recently.

The wind he makes when he stands back up makes it flicker like a stroboscope. His pulse thrums in his ears after the brusque movement, loud and heavy, a stark rhythm thundering in his eardrums.

A minute passes where he looks into the darkness ahead of him, all the darker for the light he's just stared into, and allows his pulse to steady.

Only it won't.

It... keeps beating. He looks away from the candle, into the darkness before him, and slowly comes to know, like awakening from a dream, that the kick-drum he's hearing doesn't come from inside of him at all: it's the heavy sound of bass, far away, reverberating through the wall, reaching him under the earth.

Electronic music. A club.

He runs.

It's like digging a tunnel through the crust of the earth, upwards, to resurface covered in soil but _very much alive_.

He runs his way following only the sound of the drums, until he finds a staircase, and a corridor, and at the end: metal doors.

_The elevator_.

An orange neon tube spells out the words _“L'au-dèla volé”...._ The Stolen Afterlife _._

He finds himself laughing, bracing against the wall, his pace slowing down. His heart beats in tone with the club bass, but it's not hard at all to tell the two apart.

As he comes to stand in front of the elevator, he notices that there's no button to press. But he takes a step back, smiling; just as he notices the blinking light of a surveillance camera above the doors, they slide open.

His pupils constrict in the pure white of its fluorescent light. He turns around, gazes one last time into the darkness of the catacombs, and allows his eyes to close at the same time as the doors.

It will take him wherever he needs to go.

Reliquit dives omnia  
aliis et moritur

_____

A la mort,  
on laisse tout.

_To death,_ _we relinquish all._

_-_ Inscription found in the catacombs of Paris

_They're coming. Thor fullfilled his duty and called for back-up._

_He slides to the floor, his hand pressed to his ribs, blood oozing out between his fingers where the handle of Loki's blade still sticks out._

“ _You have nowhere to go” he says. It doesn't feel strained; his breath is even. He doesn't focus on the pain, only on his grip on the gun he has pointed to Loki's head._

_Loki, on his knees before him, looks into his eyes and laughs._

“ _As if I ever had.”_

“ _You did. You had a future, a promising one. You could have been...”_

“ _I could have been_ nothing _, just as I am now. Just as_ we _are now. When will you get it? When will you understand that there is_ _nowhere to go, nothing to hold on to, and nothing to look forward to?_ ”

_Thor takes in the perfection of Loki's slim frame, the unbearable calmness of his posture. He isn't scared, even though they're coming for him and he'll be tried and jailed. It truly is as if nothing matters to him._

_The void in his eyes is what threatens to drag Thor under the most. The utter impassive_ boredom  _he sees in them. It's as if Loki simply is no longer alive, and doesn't remember how it ever felt to be._

“ _Why, Loki? Why—just why have you allowed yourself to sink like this--”_

_Another humourless chuckle tumbles from Loki's lips, his eyes still cold and unblinking on Thor's._

“ _Sink? I'm not sinking, Thor. I'm drifting.”_

_Thor feels his lip quiver. He doesn't want to feel this impotency, this sadness. He affirms his grip on his gun, if only to hold onto it._

“ _You call this drifting? You had a standing before. Beliefs. Goals. Now you—you're a low-life. A criminal. You don't give a shit about anything, you're not motivated by anything. I'd say you have sunk very, very low.”_

_Loki holds his gaze. There's a minuscule glimmer, somewhere far away, deep under the ocean of his eyes. But the void swallows it before Thor can hold on._

_Loki's next words are but a whisper._

“ _I had one thing I held onto. One love, one aspiration. When I understood its nature, it became tainted. But when I analysed its stains, I realized they weren't mine.”_

_Thor is listening, but nothing is happening in him, nothing. His hand trembles on the gun, but he doesn't feel it._

_Loki bows forwards. “After looking at it more, I understood that these stains weren't real. And still, because of them, I couldn't have what I wanted. So I started to think: what else, out there, isn't real, but shapes our lives? And then... then I understood that all the things that mould us, all the thing we hold on to and which hold us back... all of them aren't real. And just like that, everything I held onto, everything I thought mattered... just vanished”_

“ _What are you talking about?”_

_This smile is real, but that makes it worse._

“ _That day, in Montparnasse... When we talked on the phone. You really don't know what I was saying, do you? You weren't just faking ignorance.”_

_Thor tries to remember, but the memory is vague._

“ _You told me you loved me. I suppose you mean you were lying?”_

“ _Lying? No, brother, I was being at my most honest.”_

“ _Then what do you mean?”_

“ _Why would it hurt so much to confess something to you you already knew, you fool? You should have known, if you truly knew me, what I meant.”_

_Thor feels a knot in his throat he does not want to acknowledge, and a pressure in his gut he wants to think comes from his posture. “I still don't know what you're talking about, Loki. You're too vague. If you wanted me to understand... if you really wanted me to understand, you'd put things in a way they were unmistakable”_

“ _But that's the thing. What I thought, that day, was that you were ignoring it on purpose. Because you couldn't face it yourself. Because, as with your mortality, you look away from it so you can pretend it isn't real, to make life easier. But the real tragedy is... you really_ couldn't _see it, could you? Your perception... your perception lied to you, because all you_ ever _see is what you_ can _see, and I could_ never _make you see what I can.”_

_Just as Thor's mind understood—understood that Loki didn't dare speak for all that he was always misunderstood—understood that no dialogue could ever fix this--_

_They kicked down the door, and gunshots rang bright in his ears. Loki's chest exploded in bright red before him, but his eyes showed no void, no fear--_

_Seeing him fall with a last sarcastic smirk on his features, Thor finally lost consciousness._

The dust of toppled over and broken marble statues covers the floor, all glazed in their smell of stone. Busts and broken faces, memories of human shapes now reduced to dust. Timeless and still, dead forever, and yet never alive.

The bullet riddled couch. A golden table, with a bottle and two ostentatious jewelled golden chalices.

And on the white couch, looking slightly to the side, clad all in black, is Loki.

Thor's footsteps crackle on the broken remains of faked human likenesses. Loki looks towards the sound.

The long, delicate fingers of Loki's left hand precariously balance the stem of a wine glass; but in his right, they strongly clutch a handgun.

He's so beautiful it feels wrong to look at him. Like a staged photograph, like something like him couldn't exist in real life, so frail, marble skin framed by strands of black silk, another statue. Thor stands, trembling. He can't believe he's right there, cut-out and contrasting starkly, his face so pale, his hair so dark, and his eyes so intensely beautiful.

But it's only a shot, and in the next, a cruel smirk adorns Loki's features.

“What is it, brother? You look like you're seeing a ghost.”

Thor doesn't know what he expected. Maybe for the world to dissolve once he found him—for everything to crumble into white dust, for time to unwind. White light. An end.

“There you are” Thor says, as nothing comes.

Time stands still between them, the silence weighs a thousand tons.

Oh, how Thor missed his silences.

Loki's face is a mask of boredom.

“How very observant of you. Although I am a bit disappointed—no growling, no yelling? No anger at finding me alive?”

“Anger? I mourned you, Loki. I mourned you for so long that the mere suggestion you might be alive made me question everything I knew.”

A glimmer passes through Loki's eyes, but he doesn't comment on Thor's observation.

Instead, he lifts the handgun, pretends to examine it.

Loki takes a sip of his Rosé. He lowers the glass and raises the gun to inspect it.

"You dropped this on your first visit. I hope you don't mind me taking it as a souvenir."

Carefully, he puts his wine glass on the floor, re-aims the gun at Thor, and takes something out of his pocket. A black device with a wire; Thor's intercom, he realizes without surprise.

"This, too. Although I must admit it didn't prove helpful at all, considering you  _didn't_ follow orders and came up here any way." He chuckles. "Quite a surprise, to see you standing right there, and quite a pleasant one to see you get shot. I see that didn't kill you... but it's not too late for that."

Thor chuckles. “Is that why you brought me here? To shoot me?”

Loki clucks his tongue. “Typical, Thor. You think everything revolves around you. Well, I'll have you know that I didn't _bring_ you here—I merely didn't hinder your arrival.”

That catches his attention. “Interesting. Is that what you've been telling yourself?”

For just a second, Loki's eyes narrow. But before Thor can question what he saw, he's pointing the gun at Thor's chest.

“Why are you here?” Loki asks, impassively.

Thor huffs. “Because you 'didn't hinder my arrival', apparently”

A twitch in Loki's eye. Otherwise, his face is calm.

“Don't test my patience. You know I can shoot you. You know I will.”

At that, Thor stops, and thinks.

Loki's arm doesn't shake. His aim is firm, his eye trained.

Thor nods, slowly. “Yes, I know. What I don't know is whether or not you want to.”

Loki gives him a smile, as sincere as his apathy, as sincere as the sentence he says. “More than anything.”

Thor closes his eyes, and tries with the truth.

“I'm here because I wanted to know if you were alive.”

He opens his eyes, and they meet Loki's before he starts to speak.

“You saw me alive. Twice.” he merely states.

Thor nods. “And twice, I doubted my perception.”

Loki frowns. “Are you even capable of such a thing?”

He takes another moment, to think about it.

Now, it all seems far away, absurd. The state he was in, the drifting sense of timelessness, the perpetual disorientation... it seems impossible to grasp, now that he's back to his senses.

Yet somehow, he has a feeling that Loki would know what he's talking about.

He takes a step forward, but stops when Loki straightens his grip on the gun with a gaze of warning.

“I was... drifting. I didn't know what was real, and what wasn't. I got lost in thought, meandering, waiting for something to happen, to wake me up.”

He doesn't doubt his perception now. He sees the change in Loki's eyes. He sees, for a moment, in the flash of light in a stroboscope, how something glimmers there, frail and real, hit, pulled to the surface.

Then, the void returns. “You seem awake to me now.”

“I am.” he simply says. At Loki's empty eyes, he dares to ask, “Are you?”

A pause falls between them, another silence, thick with things unsaid, dense like the ocean in Loki's eyes. He sits there, pale and unmoving, like the statues that lay scattered around them.

Slowly, Loki averts his gaze, and lowers the gun.

Thor takes a tentative step forward.

“Is that what happened to you, that night in the club? You woke up?”

Loki looks at the gun, turns it around in his hands, stalling. His voice takes on that dream-like pitch Thor knows all too well.

“From what, I wonder? I didn't suddenly become sober, and I wasn't asleep in the first place.”

Thor takes a deep breath, feeling the air enter his lungs, stocked only slightly by the damaged rib, yet not strongly enough to halt how good it is to simply breathe.

“You know what I mean” he says, finally.

Loki stands up, gaining back the distance Thor hadn't quite managed to close.

He paces, and his voice gets low, a tone Thor supposes is meant to ground him, although Thor can feel it waver.

“Do I? No, I don't think I do. I _am_ awake. I'm more awake than _you_. I, at least, don't lie to myself with fantasies of purpose, with promises of change. I take life for what it is: a wait, a pointless wait, a burden placed on us at random we can only shoulder, or die.”

Thor feels his nostrils flare and his voice rise. “And yet, for someone who cares about life as little as you say you do, you sure seemed scared for your life that night”

Loki turns around, gun raised, pointed straight at Thor's chest again. His voice betrays his defensiveness. “I knew you were coming. _I_ called Interpol, so they'd get rid of the pesky Grandmaster for me. Tell me, if I cared for my life, if I cared for what happened to me, why would I have been there?”

Thor raises his hands, and shrugs. “I don't know. I could have caught you, as I nearly did, and imprisoned you. It does seem like something you didn't think through at all”

Loki's jaw is set, his pupils constricted, but his voice still tries to hold on to the farce of calmness.

“Because I didn't. I didn't care what happened. Nothing mattered to me, not even overthrowing the Grandmaster, not even owning the whole underground of Paris, as I do now. Everything I've done, ever since I first contemplated upon the absurdity of it all, has been waiting for death to come, bored, impassive to whatever life put in my way.”

“And yet...” Thor starts again, but Loki comes a step closer to him with the gun, standing tall, his eyes commanding silence.

“What do you want, Thor? Because this answers your question, doesn't it? I _am_ alive. You can leave now. You can go back to Interpol, tell them everything, have me arrested again for all I care.”

Thor takes another breath.

He registers everything: the timeless room, no longer golden but instead sepia for the dust of marble demolished all around them. The faint smell of Loki, of the nervousness he won't allow himself to feel.

Above him, a chandelier hangs from the ceiling, ostentatious; its art déco design reminds him of times long past, yet the lights burning within it are modern, fluorescent.

It doesn't lie. They aren't lost in time: they are right now.

He looks back at Loki.

He isn't a memory. He isn't a figment of his past. He's real, in the flesh, in Thor's grasp.

It's livid, when he feels it, a thing of madness clawing itself free in his guts, no thought, all instinct: what he _wants._

His voice is raw, his heart beats heavily. "And if I refuse?" he asks.

Loki purses his lips. "Let's see. Oh, right—I have a gun. All _you_ have is half a sewer stuck to your shoes."

Thor remembers the catacombs and smiles.

"I have lost everything I once held on to, brother. What meaning do you think my life has to me?"

Thor sees it, right before his eyes: a flash of _fear_ crosses Loki's face, bringing colour to his cheeks.

The urge it raises within Thor is instantaneous. He has a déjà vu of the feeling it causes: it's the same he had whenever he heard Loki's laughter, whenever he gazed into his eyes. The same overwhelming feeling of hearing Loki vulnerable, his _real_ voice, when the mask dropped—the same love he had for his expressive silences.

Loki swallows, his face returning to calm, but Thor isn't fooled, hasn't been from the start. Loki may lie to himself, and his perception may as well, but Thor's instinct _doesn't_.

He grins.

“I know what you were doing that night. Why you brought me to you”

Loki rolls his eyes, but a bead of sweat rolls down his temple. “I told you. I knew you were coming, and I didn't care.”

“That's what you were telling yourself, all the while. But no matter how blasé you always want to seem, brother, I know you. You're curious. And that night you wanted to see what would happen to you if you saw me again.”

Loki snarls. “Except I already knew what would happen: you would see me, try to chase me, and fail. Once again, I gained no satisfaction from it, so I moved on.”

Thor laughs. “Oh, that may be what happened, when you tell the story in words. But I'd wager the thought that what you felt that night... was a _fear_ for your life you had not expected to feel, which made you run away to protect yourself like you didn't even think you wanted to.”

Trembling now, Loki takes a step forward, then another, until the gun hits Thor's chest, and then he presses on.

Obediently, Thor takes a step back, then another, until he finds himself next to the last standing marble statue, the replica of a blank faced Venus without arms.

The gun on his chest jerks slightly. Thor thinks that Loki is holding it there simply to still his hands... to hold on to _something_.

“Is this some... some form of rhetoric? Are you trying to prove something to me? That I am wrong, that life _does_ have meaning and is quite nice if I just give it the chance? Are we back here, Thor?”

Thor shakes his head. “Oh, no, Loki. Meaning is not what this is _about_. Every meaning we assign to life is nothing but something we make up. Something—oh, _now_ I get it—something to hold on to, so we don't find ourselves drifting.”

Hearing this from Thor's mouth seems to have struck something within Loki. The gun digs into Thor's chest hard enough to hurt.

“Then why aren't you drifting, Thor? If you aren't holding on to anything any more—” his voice breaks slightly. Loki's jaw is tense, his lips pursed; but his eyes are as unreadable as the statue next to him. “If you know this, _why aren't you drifting_?”

Thor feels it flow through him, rush through his veins with every beat of his pulse: a realization, and within it, as unexpected as it might be, a _purpose_.

He feels the want he's held caged inside of him for so long spread within him. He closes his eyes, and allows himself to feel it, knowing now that isn't wrong, and it isn't right, and that those things indeed matter none at all.

He opens his eyes, and smiles. His voice has sunk to the warning growl of a beast.

“Because it's quite different to know something... and to _feel_ it. Isn't it, Loki?”

Then, for one last moment, time stands still.

Loki's mask finally drops, and it's the most beautiful thing Thor has ever seen: like that night, that frame in strobe, but so much more, because now he can feel it as well--

His eyes wide and shocked, but now sober and glistening with tears, the ocean within them finally spilling. His mouth parted, lips bitten, his expression frail, a word hanging there lost between them he won't let tumble out.

Thor's ready to lunge--

And then, Loki takes a step back, jerks the gun away from Thor's chest, and with the deafening noise of its shot the marble Venus next to him _explodes_.

Everything is ringing, ringing--

The light is bright when he finally manages to open his eyes, coughing out white dust. He blinks in confusion.

Loki isn't there.

He scrambles up to his feet. His left ear is bleeding, ringing still, with the other he hears the crunch of his boots on debris.

Loki shot the statue and escaped.

Thor roars, wild. He is more animal than man, now. All he feels are his pain and his want, and this anger, this survival instinct, numbs every thought.

He doesn't stop to think. He knows _exactly_ where Loki is.

No thought remains. His brain no longer tries to make sense of things: all there is, now, after the external layers of cognition have been scorched away, are animal instincts, the sheer physical need to _feel_.

Life instinct. Self-preservation. Hunt, run, devour, _fuck_.

He smiles, his pupils adjusting to the light as he approaches the mirror, seeing himself in it and not caring about the image.

It's only that: an image. It's not what he feels, inside.

He knows his mistake now. Words, words upon words—but words are thought and memory. Of course Loki won't understand it with words.

He needs to make him _feel_.

He exhales in a growl, anticipation prickling up in every nerve ending, every neuron firing signals, a shiver from head to toe.

He rips the mirror down from its frame, and as it shatters in an uproar of noise, he smiles up at the staircase behind.

He climbs.

His pupils dilate, his nostrils flare, his senses flood.

The light is dim, eerie. One side of the room a-glow in a ghostly turquoise, the other an obscene shade of pink, both projected upwards from below, leaving the ceiling dark.

A heavy fog lies a foot thick on the black-tiled floor, oozing calmly until Thor wades through it dispersing it in rivulets to catch the bichrome rays. It fills his nose with a sweet smell, sandalwood or myrrh, something heavy, heady, clouding.

The beat from the club reverberates through the walls, heavy tones of bass that synch up with his pulse, making him vibrate.

“Loki”, he growls.

There's a noise in the corner, a whimper and a shift like that of a small animal discovered by a predator.

Thor finds himself grinning, baring all his teeth.

He disturbs the cloud at his feet, bathing the room in disarray, following the sound of Loki's voice. The fog dissipates to reveal Loki crouching in the corner, a black shadow trying to blend in, but Thor's instincts do not lie.

Their eyes meet, Loki's wide open, expressive—affraid, scared for his _life_ in a way primal and devoid of thought--

Before he can reach for the gun at his side, Thor has crossed the room in wide strides.

Loki weighs nothing, more shadow than man when Thor grabs the collar of his turtleneck and hurls him up, shoves him against the window panel that replaces one side of the wall.

He feels another gushing of electricity, another signal from his brain to his nerves, every reward sensor on edge: Loki looks at him like he's fully aware of his threat, of his body, scared and yet curious, always so curious, like the proverbial cat. He glows brighter than the moon crescent behind him, half of his face lit up turquoise, the other bathed in pink shadows.

“What are you--” Loki starts in a startled whisper.

Thor presses the palm of his hand firmly against his mouth, watching Loki's eyes spark.

“No more words” he growls, and he can tell his voice vibrates through Loki's spine from the way his brother shivers, his whimper colliding against Thor's palm.

No words now. He needs to feel him first. He's had his memory for so long that now all he wants is to feel his presence.

He can feel Loki so close, can _smell_ him—fresh and new and yet familiar and well-known—it was years ago, _years_ since he saw him last and resisted fiercely the urge to touch, and yet he understands now the desire that kept him feeling uncomfortable whenever he was so near.

It felt wrong back then, because he _thought_ it wrong. Now he doesn't think it wrong or right. He just _feels_ it, and it feels amazing.

Madly, he wants to make Loki feel it too.

The hand he keeps on his collar opens fluently to wrap firmly around Loki's throat. He feels his brother's pulse, frantic and alive, blood gushing through and air—his _life_ in Thor's palm. He's not a ghost at all. Thor can _feel_ it.

When his hand lets go of Loki's mouth, he gasps for air, and when Thor's other hand presses closer in response he can feel Loki's Adam's apple sliding over his palm as he swallows.

His free hand wastes no time to press against Loki's chest and find his warmth, then his heartbeat. He lets it slide lower, ghosts over his sternum, feels the notch underneath where Loki's muscles jump and twitch.

He feels so vibrant and there, in his arms, like he's never felt him before and yet somehow knows he's always wanted to.

He looks up into Loki's eyes. They are filled with doubt, fragility, confusion—Thor lets out a groan at the want he feels deep in his belly.

Loki has let his mask drop. He couldn't but let it; he's _feeling_ this.

But the uncertainty in him—Thor understands. Something within Loki is fighting this. Something within him did not think it possible, and had stopped expecting.

“I was stubborn, and held on. To my... to what I thought was right. But the things that held me afloat also held me back, and kept me from feeling what I truly wanted.”

Loki's lip quivers, his eyes roam over Thor's face. He's on the brink to let go, on the very brink—but he can't allow himself.

“I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know—I don't know—it's too vague. All I ever wanted--”

“All you ever wanted was clarity, understanding, and knowledge. All I ever wanted was to be _right._ But we were both wrong, and those are both diversions—there _are_ no answers. There's only _this_.”

He leans forward, slowly, slowly, into Loki's face. Their eyes are open. They breathe the same air.

Loki's breath is tantalizing on his lips. He wants to allow his eyes to close, to close the gap—but this distance, this charged silence, is so precious and filled with Loki's uncertainty that he needs to savour it first.

Loki pants, a breath vibrates softly against his vocal chords, the smallest of sounds. Thor's whole body shivers, and his eyelids droop and shut.

He feels the movement of Loki's lips as he speaks, almost touching, just an atom of distance apart, and his voice is so near and low it fills him.

“I know I am awake. I know I am alive. And yet—and yet--”

“And yet what?” Thor asks.

“My perception lies.”

And Thor could argue with him for a million years, but thoughts and words are Loki's ground, and he always understood them and controlled them so well they took over everything else.

He can't make him understand.

He can just feel.

He angles his head, hovers against Loki's lips.

It's a moment only, a moment eternal, where every barrier is lowered, and there's the edge of perception, and the doubtful precipice between feeling and thought, between wake and dream, between adrift and alive.

Then he _kisses_ him.

All thought is gone. All he can feel is his small intake of breath, the softness of his lips, and the maddening heat when they part slightly.

_Not enough._

Both his hands grab Loki's face, pull him towards him, and Loki makes a whimper that drives him _mad_ so he growls and presses his hungry, open mouth onto Loki's and then--

Loki's hands are in his hair, pulling, smashing their mouths together, and Thor presses his tongue into his mouth and he can _taste_ him, finally, _finally_ , he's free and his urge only grows and the want unleashes and he wants _all of him_ \--

As he charges forward with his whole body, his hips leading the way, slamming Loki's head against the window pane, they hear a threatening _crack_.

His pupils take a moment to adjust for how wide they've grown, and he sees Loki's face, eyes hooded and black as his, lips red and swollen.

They're suspended in time, the window crackling, all their weight against it, but all Thor can care about is this moment. He couldn't care for memory, he couldn't care to remember; all he cares about is Loki, now, in the flesh, in his arms.

They could die, now, pressed together firmly. Plunge down into Paris as the night slowly fades.

Loki's eyes, clouded with lust, sparkling with fear, glowing _alive_.

“I was alive, all this time” he whispers. “But I did not remember what it felt like to be awake.”

Thor cradles his cheek in his hand, a gesture as soft as it is demanding. “Are you now?”

Thor can see the decision spread in Loki's mind as the cracks in the window spread behind his body: his eyes close--

and he _shoves_ Thor away, slamming him into the opposite wall, his lithe body covering his in warmth and life, frantic and animal, slender hips pushing up into his, his hands clawing at Thor's beard in begging.

Then all is Loki's tongue, and Thor chasing it, closing the gap between their mouths and sealing them together.

Their tongues fight each other, teeth and lips are everywhere, it's wet and messy and everything Thor never allowed himself to have so he needs to take it all _now_ , needs to bite at Loki, feel him lapping against his mouth, his spit slicking into his beard, every breath shared, not a millimetre apart.

The small noises Loki makes into his mouth leave no room for human doubt. He's lost his mind, he's animal, and as such he knows what he wants. All thought is sucked out of him.

All he wants is to touch.

He doesn't know where they're going, but he pushes away from the wall so strongly he needs to hold Loki's body against his so he doesn't fall backwards, and without separating, without coming up for air, he stomps forwards into the room, both of them pressed together, trying to claw inside the other.

They bump against the strange furniture, knocking things over, uncaring, groaning into each other's mouths, sharing vibration, until Thor realizes it's not enough.

His hands moving over Loki's clothes aren't enough. He needs to touch his skin, feel every line and contour, _feel_ the marble paleness of it to _know_ he's not statue, but alive.

He tugs Loki's sweater out of his high waisted trousers, slides his fingers over his stomach. It twitches under him, ticklish, and it's so warm, slightly toned but not overly muscular, and Thor presses his hand flat against it. The other hand falls to hook into his belt, and he can feel—with a pang of lust—that Loki is hard, irradiating warmth against the heel of his hand where the buttons of his pants are raised by his erection.

Now. Gods, he needs this now. He knows how it feels: his own hardness chafes, trapped inside his own jeans.

Behind Loki's shoulder, he sees a padded bench. Loki yelps when his thighs make contact with it, and Thor doesn't hesitate to throw him over it, although Loki is determined to drag him down with him, one hand in his hair, the other clawing at the space between Thor's shoulders.

Blindly, he grabs Loki's thighs, lifting his legs, finding them hook around his torso, _god yes_ , his _brother's_ legs, holding him close. The thought makes him violent, he wants more.

He grabs the hem of the turtleneck, tries pulling it upward, but gives up because he doesn't want Loki to let go of his neck, he doesn't want him to _ever_ let go. Instead, he pushes it upwards as far as he can, brushing both his thumbs over Loki's nipples on the way.

“Stronger” Loki says, a mad, desperate little whimper. “I want to _feel_ you.”

Thor looks at him again, stomach and nipples exposed, throat and arms covered with the black material, face flushed.

He doesn't need to be persuaded.

He takes his fingers down and scratches at Loki's nipples, takes them, twists them until Loki wheezes.

“Hurt me”, Loki pleads, finally, “Hurt me. Mark me. For all the shit I've done”

Thor's cock twitches in response. Loki _wants_ this. Loki _feels_ this.

With a last bite under his chin that has Loki choking on a broken moan, Thor hooks his thumbs on the hem of the sweater to lift it higher, until he can squeeze Loki's throat again. He half climbs on the bench with him, one knee on the side of it, and then he bends his back to bite Loki's nipple.

Loki's smell is so strong, the texture of his skin here so good—he cries out, and Thor delights on hearing him choke at the end of the cry when he deliberately squeezes his throat.

Savagely, out of control at Loki's helpless moans, Thor wants to taste him. He wants to taste his blood and know he's alive--

The next scream is in complete pain as Thor manages to rupture the skin with precision. Just the smallest gush of ripped flesh, and he can--

Loki pulls at his hair to look into his eyes, and Thor vaguely wonders if he's gone too far, if he hurt him too much. But Loki's eyes, although they're filled with tears, scream out how undone he is, how out of control. A bitch in heat. Life instinct flaring.

Smiling, looking him straight in the eye, Thor extends his tongue to lick up the nipple, the copper taste of Loki's blood subtle, but ecstatic.

Loki throws his head back and whines. Thor can feel the vibrations through his chest and on his hand.

“ _Yes_ ” Loki whimpers, swallowing against Thor's palm. “Break me all you want.”

Thor sucks on his nipple like it will feed him, unafraid to scrape it with his teeth. He's lost his mind. He finds himself grinding his hips against Loki's perfectly placed ass, but it's not enough...

He wants to feel Loki here too, he wants to feel his warm skin under him. The mere thought makes him shiver, a violent pang to his cock, his throat goes dry.

Without a hint of warning, he glides an arm along Loki's spine to grab his back.

He pulls him up so suddenly Loki's head lolls back, exposing his throat above the black material. Thor bites it, tears into it, and pulls Loki backwards with him pinching the skin with his front teeth, feeling the vibrations of Loki's cry.

Dragging him by his throat, Thor takes a few uncontrolled steps backwards until his back collides against something hard. Another piece of furniture.

He gasps for air.

Loki, dishevelled, gapes at him, his mouth panting, his lips bitten, his face neon blue and pink and _savage_. His eyes roam over him and the object behind, glistening with lust.

Thor feels the object with an arm behind his back. It's some sort of cross, to be strapped to.

“What is this place even?” he groans, his voice like gravel.

Loki licks his lips. “Atonement. If you believe yourself a sinner, let yourself be strapped to the cross. Let yourself be punished.”

Thor grabs Loki's belt again, possessive. “Have you ever been?”

Loki laughs, breathlessly. “Have you not been paying attention? To consider oneself a sinner, one must first believe in sin. It's a beautiful idea, of course, poetic by its own right—but I have no use for it.”

“And yet, merely a moment ago” Thor rumbles, a smile tugging on his lips, “you wanted me to punish you.”

His brother never liked his incongruities to be pointed out. He looks at him caught in the flaw of his own logic.

“I was... an observer. I thought... myself superior... to simple _lust_.”

“And now?” Thor mutters against his breath, watching Loki's clever eyes flit over his features.

“Now” he admits, slowly, “I feel otherwise.”

Loki looks at him for another moment, breathless—and then both his hands are in Thor's lap, his eyes staring at him with hunger. Thor gasps as Loki opens his belt and pants daftly, with skill.

“I want you to fuck me” Loki says, palming at his clothed cock savagely. Thor fights to keep his eyes open, the sensation so much, so much.

Loki's hand on his balls through his underwear, and the other at the hem--

“ _Brother_ ”, Thor groans as Loki sinks to his knees, tugging down--

Then, Loki's hand cups his cock through his underwear, and his eyes close from the sensation.

Loki's hand is warm, Thor is already so sensitive, he feels like he's going to explode--

“ _Yes_ ” Loki hisses, and Thor feels it against his cock, feels kisses on his pelvis as he tears and tugs until Thor's strained cock is finally, _finally_ free.

Thor groans when Loki yanks at it, madly, with desperation, all his fingers on it, the other hand going in between his legs, exploring his balls, then smearing Thor's pre-cum over his wet tip.

“Gods yes” Loki pants against it, incoherently, “ _yes_ ”, and then there's no more words because Loki's lips are on the tip of his cock--

His little brother on his knees, so wrong so wrong but _nothing matters_ , swallowing Thor's cock, teeth pushing back his foreskin and Thor yelps, his head thuds against the cross behind him, but Thor doesn't rest, he nods his head forward and _looks_.

Loki focuses on it, bangs lose to shade his eyes, and then he's humming against it and Thor hisses as he pulls at his hair and whatever held it together comes lose for Thor to grasp and push.

Loki makes a chortled sound, Thor's cock hitting the back of his palate, and Thor's eyes roll back.

He roars, nothing on his mind, _nothing,_ blank, only pleasure crashing every nerve receptor ending as Loki vacuums and sucks and sucks and sucks, head bobbing in Thor's grasp, hand at the base of his cock, _everywhere_ , and Thor knows that he's going to come but it will be _nothing_ because Loki is right here right now and this will barely sate him, it's just a moment's pause--

Loki's eyes flash up at him, the corners of his lips—he's smiling—and Thor pulls at his hair just at the right moment, Loki's hand still pumping, to come all over his smile, drops landing on his tongue.

His cock doesn't even fully soften, not with the way Loki's still lapping at it. His voice is gorgeously hoarse when he speaks.

“You've always been an animal. So _remarkably_ alive. You could go on for hours, couldn't you”

Thor can't speak. _Animal_. He grabs Loki's hair, delighting in the pained whimper, the anguished expression, when he pulls him up by it, all muscles in his arm working to drag Loki up and crash their faces together. Loki moans, his hardening cock slippery against Thor's when he straightens his body to press flush against his.

Separating, but unwilling to fully let go of his lips, Loki pulls at his shirt, walking backwards. “Come” a kiss, “Here” and another kiss, “You're going to _fuck_ me” he whispers against his mouth and then bites.

They're on some sort of bench now, round, like the sort found in gyms to jump over, although Thor suspects this has an entirely different use. He doesn't care. He cares only for the cry Loki lets out when Thor crashes him into it, making his body bend and their lips separate again.

Loki's mouth gapes open, red, and Thor sees the mischievous glimmer in his eyes.

With a last kiss of parting, Loki pushes him off and turns around.

Instantly, Thor misses his face. He takes him into his arms from behind, buries his face into his hair to breathe in the scent of it.

Gods. He could remember his face and his voice, but the scent of him was lost.

He feels himself grow harder as his exposed cock finds Loki's ass. He feels the shiver and subsequent tremble of Loki's body as he roams his hands over his exposed nipples, slides them down to rest on his hipbones.

He growls when he pulls him closer, grinding against him, and Loki hums.

“Wait” he says.

Thor doesn't _want_ to wait. Thor wants--

He palms at Loki's cock, without grabbing it, just presses both his hands flat against his pelvis, delineating his shape. He closes his eyes only to smell and feel him better.

For a second, Loki arches back into him with a choked moan. Then he seems to regain his composure, bends forward and opens a drawer in the bench.

He presses something cold against Thor's hand. “You'll need this.” he says, taking one of Thor's hands to curl his fingers around the object. “And I need this.”

Thor opens his eyes, looks over Loki's shoulder: in his own hand is a bottle of lube. In Loki's, a small latex ring.

Their fingers graze for a second as Loki reaches for his cock to slip the cockring on. The pang of desire inside him is instantaneous, sending blood rushing to his cock again, significantly shortening his refractory period.

Loki makes a small keening noise once he has it on. “What are you waiting for? I said you were going to _fuck_ me.”

“Loki”, Thor says, menace in his words.

Loki shudders. “Yes?”

He licks up Loki's neck, bites his earlobe, only to growl his next words low. “You talk too much”

Then, in one swift motion, he bends Loki over the bench and tears his pants down to his thighs.

Loki moans. “Shut me up, then”

Thor rams his hips into Loki's, crashing his brother's cock into the bench, delighting in his pained hiss.

He grinds against him as he opens the bottle, drizzles the lube onto his fingers.

Loki is holding onto the bench, his back long and beautiful. But Thor doesn't get caught in the marvel of it for long.

He has a purpose, now.

Without a warning, he presses two fingers against Loki's entrance. His cock twitches, at half mast. Gods, he can't wait.

“Hnngh”, makes Loki, and Thor uses his other hand to spread his cheeks a bit, still vehemently pushing against the ring of muscle until finally, _finally_ , the tip of one slips inside, and the other follows, holding it open.

He tilts the bottle onto his fingers, watching it drip down Loki's crack. In a scissoring motion, he wriggles his fingers into him.

Loki bites the other side of the bench to silence his moans.

Thor won't have that.

He bends over Loki's body, half covering it with his own weight until he can nuzzle Loki's neck.

Without fully withdrawing the fingers he has inside he presses in a third one.

Loki howls, his head tilts back, and Thor bites at the nape of his neck, holds him there with his teeth as he fingers him, loosens Loki up with vigour until he begs.

“Please” he mutters under his breath. With every thrust and wriggling of his fingers Loki loses a bit more of his composure, a bit more of the rationale he always clung to so firmly, reverts into an animal, hips crashing back, his only word a plea.

And Thor, with his vision clouded by desire, wants to watch him unravel. To watch his human reason die; to see him stripped away of word and thought until only silence and emotion remain.

He takes all fingers out of him, leaving his hole gaping open, but he has no time to gaze. No time to think. He turns Loki around, grabs his thighs and lifts him up.

Loki whines, grinds his ass against Thor's cock as he saddles him with his legs, all his weight in Thor's arms, so solid, so present. Thor groans, wonders if he could—it would take no effort at all, he's strong enough--

His cock is right between Loki's ass cheeks, sliding maddeningly, and he can't wait any more.

“Hold on to me” he says, and Loki looks into his eyes.

They hold each other's gaze.

Thor hadn't noticed that the neon lights are softer now, the contrast lessened as the sky outside turned from black to purple; he hadn't realized how Loki's face seems less artificial now, only a faint reminder of pink in the background, the rest a natural light.

A moment of pause.

_Hold on to me._

They look into each other's eyes, petrified, just for an instant, for a timeless moment, as reality sinks in, as everything returns.

Whether they're both dead or both alive, it doesn't matter: they're both  _here_ .

In each other's arms.

Holding on to each other, and it's clear, so clear: it's not them that don't matter. It's everything else.

Then, time resumes.

Loki slides his arms around Thor's neck, holds on, and Thor, panting, holding his weight with only one arm uses the other to guide his cock--

Loki takes in a breath, hooks his head over Thor's shoulder, the silence of his held breath heavy against Thor's ear--

A small resistance, as Loki's hole has closed up again, so Thor holds himself steady, huffs with exertion and the painful task of keeping his composure while Loki's flesh parts around his glans--

And then Loki, levelling himself with his legs and his arms, pressing his face against the side of Thor's and whispering, “Brother”, while he finally relaxes, and Thor slides _inside_.

Eyes closed, still standing, fully sheathed inside Loki, Loki warm and solid in his arms holding onto him for dear life.

Not a  _sound_ . A deep, reverent silence, filled with meaning.

His footsteps are barely real, dispersing the last remnants of fog, when Thor marches forwards and finds the bed. It's enormous, covered in a sheet of black silk.

Slowly, still holding on to his own composure, holding his own humanity together, one last time, he puts a knee on the bed, Loki's hip held in place, not moving an inch so he doesn't slip out.

Slowly, with a long sigh, Loki disentangles himself from his neck until only his hands remain at the sides of Thor's face. They look at each other again, before they kiss.

Slow, at first. Tender. There's been no time for this so far.

And, it dawns on them, just as dawn breaks outside, there still isn't.

Within seconds, Loki is panting against him, wriggling, and Loki may be wearing a cockring to cheat his animal desperation, but Thor isn't. He needs to fuck him—he needs to fuck him _now._

Their faces part violently when Thor takes both of Loki's wrists away from his face, throws Loki down, provoking a hoarse cry. He holds his wrists above his head, both knees on the bed now, Loki pinned, still grappling him with both legs.

The position is strange, but Thor finds a way to thrust, still holding Loki's wrists. Loki chokes and shudders, their hips meeting in a rhythm that slowly establishes itself, no mind, just instinct.

“Harder” Loki whimpers, his eyes shut firmly. Thor groans as he follows his own release, his mind not clouded, rather _overexposed_ —everything so _sharp_ as he thrusts, chasing, chasing—Loki makes pained and tortured sounds, fucked into bliss but unable to come--

On the verge of his own second orgasm, the overwhelming clarity of his mind leads to a realization, not thought but felt: Loki wants his punishment to be eternal, to be _caught_ in the pain.

_Break me all you want. For all the shit I've done._

He wants the pain, but not for the purpose of atonement. He wants it to remain trapped—as he always has, in his thought spirals, in his anhedonia, in observing life rather than living it. He wants this, because he thinks pain is what life _is_.

He's kept himself close to death to prove to himself he can bear its closeness, he can bear the pain, and even now his mind won't _let go_...

He slips out and Loki whines but it makes no matter, it _doesn't matter,_ he lifts Loki up like he weighs nothing, rips through his turtleneck to have him naked and exposed with no defence.

Loki looks frightened, cold, so Thor pulls him back into his lap, sitting on the bed now, sits him down on his cock to fuck the cold out of him. Loki screams again, his hands find Thor's hair and Thor's hand finds his cock, not to pump him but to rip off the ring in a last mad scramble to make him understand that the _purpose_ of pain is _release_.

The sky outside has turned red. Thor pulls and pulls until he gets it off, but when Loki protests, when he whimpers _no_ Thor has had it, he wants him to _understand_ , so he grabs his throat again.

Loki cries, Loki crying, frail and vulnerable and past and present in his arms, perfect, his eyes mad, wide open as his emotions change, wide open for Thor to see, no longer interrupted, a torrent breaking out in them as he gags and gasps, Thor's own vision goes blurry and he still squeezes, squeezes tight, wants him to understand,

Loki's hands tearing out his hair, panicked, oh god, he's so close, his mouth shaped around Thor's name but unable to let out a sound—fighting in pure fear, _yes—_ so _close_ \--

He can feel the moment it dawns on Loki—when he stops fighting, his arms going limp to spread out at his sides, eyes rolling back, staring up like there's something _above_ \--

And Thor feels his climax come upon him, looks at Loki's face, at his eyes wide open, so beautiful _..._

A moment lost in time, a single frame:

Loki's eyes, wide and scared and ecstatic, a thousand emotions in his silence. A tear forms, clouds them, then slides down the corner of his eye.

Thor watches, enraptured, as it lights up a-flame, a sudden glow in it, the glimmer of halcyon gold, not understanding at first that what he's seeing is the very first ray of the sun reflecting on his brother's tear.

In this light, natural and timeless, a silent cry of realization curls the corners of Loki's mouth into a smile as he looks at the ceiling.

Thor follows Loki's gaze, and sees what Loki sees.

A mirror above the bed: the image of _them_. Loki, smiling with his mouth open, his eyes glistening with tears of rapture.

They are golden. They are beautiful. They are alive, human, animal, or even more than. They are gods, the only ones watching. The only ones judging. They are _free_.

And then, everything that is inside and outside, thought and feeling, memory and existence merge as he sees them and feels himself tumble, his vision sparkling, and just as Loki's body collapses, fucked to completion without being stroked, going limp, Thor lets go of his throat.

Loki gasps for breath like he has just been born, like it's the very first time he breathes at all, and Thor is right there, bent over him, smiling against his mouth as he comes inside of him.

Everything dissolves in white light.

When consciousness finds him, it doesn't feel like waking up at all. More like a continuation of a previous state... dream or not, life or not, it doesn't matter.

He feels himself, every part of his body. The soft dull ache of his muscles makes him feel vibrantly physical, all in one place. The sunlight is bright, not a single cloud seems to mar it, although the sun has moved away from the window, too far up in the sky to be seen.

He's alone in the bed, but the scent is still there. Real, and present, not memory, not imagination.

He stretches, feeling every bone, every muscle; the pain in his ribs, in his ear. Above him, a golden version of him imitates his movements.

He rolls out of bed. There's no fog on the floor, no strange neon lights, only the sheer, piercing clarity of the sun outside.

He finds a note on the nightstand. Loki's spidery handwriting, as he remembers it from letters and postcards and Polaroid pictures of Paris, ages ago. Lifetimes ago. _Now_.

An address, some street in Paris. To meet him there or for him to stay, Thor doesn't know.

He realizes, taking a full breath, that now that he only has the present, away from memory, all this address sets up is the future.

The club is deserted, empty, like there never was anything here at all. Only silence, and the echo of his footsteps as he crosses the ground floor where he saw Loki again for the first time.

Outside, the air is crisp, fresh. Clear and bright. It doesn't feel like he's buried. It feels like he can breathe, like he can feel every particle of oxygen flowing into his blood.

He closes his eyes, for a beat, then another.

Then, he breaks into a run, laughing, wild, exhilarated, running free through the streets of Paris, feeling the wind on his skin, the strain in his legs, the air in his lungs, no pain at all.

Only _life_.

End

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sitting on this story, I shit you not, for over a _year_.
> 
> Well, it's out now. It is not what I wanted it to be, but that's alright. After all, it only becomes a story once you read it.
> 
> This started out as a game with my wonderful friend LeandradeRaven: we'd sit in her apartment, create this neon-coloured atmosphere with heady smells and different lighting sources, and work on a similar prompt (Neon lights, ostentatious décor, and sort of BDSM-ish sex). We wanted to see where each of us would go with it.
> 
> The original plan was for me to link to her piece and for her to link to mine... but as a matter of fact, she finished it _much_ sooner, and now she has actually taken it off the internet because she posted it as a companion to a story she will actually publish.
> 
> (There's a lesson here about daring more in life that _this_ story probably conveys a lot better than the one-shot you just read. Oh well.)
> 
> I hope it wasn't too boringly overexplained, I kept pinballing between "this is too vague" and "I'm coming across as condescending for how much I'm beating this concept to death". Please be BRUTALLY honest here! On one hand I love this jumbled mess, and on the other... well, there's reasons why I didn't dare post it.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and bye!
> 
> And thank you, Leandra, I mean, you know your real name, for being the platonic love of my life and a wild daydreaming ditz of a wonderful human being xD
> 
> PS. This work is unbeta'd. If anyone would be so kind, I would definitely be up to make changes. And I really need a beta for future works.


End file.
